Guns, Gold, Secession

There is a secession movement afoot and its proponents are determined to put a halt to the federal governmentâ€™s ambitions to destroy and reconstruct an entire economy and dissolve the last remnants of individual liberty. Twenty-eight states are invoking the law of the land, the U.S. Constitution, by rolling out legislation to assert their sovereignty as free states in order to keep from being undermined by the never-ending swarm of unrestrained federal decrees.

The speed with which the federal government intends to take over private institutions and usurp statesâ€™ rights and individual autonomy is unprecedented. When the Bush-Obama regime maneuvers are compared to the Hoover-FDR New Deal era, it looks like todayâ€™s hare vs. yesterdayâ€™s turtle. The stateâ€™s various propaganda arms, from big media to institutionalized special interest forces, are being empowered to publicize and sell the agenda of the totalitarian state by painting it in glossy colors that warm the hearts of unresisting Americans. There are, however, growing pockets of dissenters who conclude that life, liberty, property, and the futures of their children are more important than the trivial things that occupy the minds of the submissive class. For that reason, the stateâ€™s militarized police force, which has been given unparalleled powers by the contrived crises following 9-11, has snowballed in size and is being fortified in expectation of confronting rebellion from those citizens who intend to resist the tyranny of an over-reaching Leviathan.

Since the Bush II regime took control and 9/11 became its launch pad for sweeping hegemony, the police state has moved more swiftly than ever to demonize resistance and criminalize dissent. The most recent example is the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) report that profiled individuals according to their political convictions, especially those ideas that agitate against the institutionalization of unconstitutional acts that are intended to grow state power at the expense of individual liberties. Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr (!), guns & ammo, taxes, the Federal Reserve, secession, and resistance to universal government service or anti-privacy actions â€“ all of those topics have become keywords in the crusade to criminalize individuals who refuse to be rounded up like cattle and marched toward serfdom.

Two years ago, a similar thing happened in Alabama when its Homeland Security Department released a report pigeonholing freedom activists as “anti-government types” who “claim that the U.S. government is infringing on their individual rights, and/or that the government’s policies are criminal and immoral.” Such groups, the report said, “May hold that the current government is violating the basic principles laid out by the U.S. Constitutionâ€¦” Donâ€™t bother to look up that report, however, because LewRockwell.com blogger Chris Brunnerâ€™s post on the Alabama report spread like wildfire â€™round the Internet, resulting in that report being pulled from the website.

In addition, the MIAC report was quickly stifled by hordes of liberty activists, leading Chuck Baldwin to say, “the most effective way to fight an ever-encroaching federal leviathan is to focus on our individual states.”

The struggle for sovereignty, though begun on the part of spontaneous individuals with leanings toward the radical principles of our nationâ€™s founding, has reached state legislatures across America in the form of sovereignty bills. According to the Christian Science Monitor, twenty-eight states are now commencing resolutions as a reaction to the sudden and massive expansion of federal powers. Even the Republic of Lakotah is declaring its withdrawal from all treaties and agreements imposed on it by the US government. The notion of state secession, once written off as a subject matter for political crackpots and eccentrics, has become a legitimate and practical solution for undoing the years of accumulated assaults on individual liberty that has come from the centralized state.

With revolutionary die-hards behind him, Mr. Pitts has fired a warning shot across the bow of the Washington establishment. As the writer of one of 28 state “sovereignty bills” â€“ one even calls for outright dissolution of the Union if Washington doesn’t rein itself in â€“ Pitts is at the forefront of a states’ rights revival, reasserting their say on everything from stem cell research to the Second Amendment.

â€¦And although Pitts [state rep from South Carolina] hails from Abbeville, the place where the South’s first secession votes were cast, he insists that today’s efforts to check federal power aren’t limited to regional pockets or even political affiliation. “The mainstream media would portray some of us as rednecks, whether we’re from Pennsylvania, Oregon, or South Carolina,” says Pitts. “But this is a wake-up call. And if Washington doesn’t heed that wake-up call, revolution is on the horizon.”

That is from a recent issue of the Christian Science Monitor. Walter Williams, a respected academic and popular, syndicated columnist, declared this in his most recent column:

Our Colonial ancestors petitioned and pleaded with King George III to get his boot off their necks. He ignored their pleas, and in 1776, they rightfully declared unilateral independence and went to war. Today it’s the same story except Congress is the one usurping the rights of the people and the states, making King George’s actions look mild in comparison. Our constitutional ignorance â€“ perhaps contempt, coupled with the fact that we’ve become a nation of wimps, sissies and supplicants â€“ has made us easy prey for Washington’s tyrannical forces. But that might be changing a bit. There are rumblings of a long overdue re-emergence of Americans’ characteristic spirit of rebellion.

Emory Professor and constitutional scholar Don Livingston notes, in his Secessionist Paper No. 19: What is Secession?, “talk about secession makes Americans nervous. For many it evokes images of the Civil War, and is emotionally (if not logically) tied to slavery, war, and anarchy. That the word “secession” is laden with these negative connotations should be surprising since America was born in an act of secession.” He goes on to describe secession as an act that “does not seek to overthrow or alter the government of a modern state, but seeks merely to limit its jurisdiction over the seceding territory.”

But still, the negative connotations of secession live on, even within some libertarian circles. Perhaps the most puzzling thing I keep hearing from some libertarians is that those of us who adhere to secessionist ideas are wacky outliers who offer no value “to the movement,” and instead, we only throw up red flags that warn others to avoid us, and libertarianism as a whole. Thus we are led to believe that our founding fathers, the architects of rebellion and the champions of Jeffersonian principles, were reactionary wackos.

The anti-radical libertarians ask for practical solutions, with “practical” being the code word for something that is acceptable to the majority of the Oprahized masses. This kind of thought is known as “libertarian lite,” or as I call it, “car wash libertarianism.” The car wash libertarians persuade others â€“ â€œespecially those new to libertarianism â€“ to stay away from the radical, “crazy” stuff and hold true to the agenda of getting “our people” elected through legitimate political means. The car wash libertarians still have a voice in the modern LP, which is also known as GOP 2.0. These libertarians are in the game not for reasons of deep-rooted principles and love of liberty, but for the social, bonding aspects, with some mild libertarianism sprinkled on the side. They love attending their local meetings and dinners each month and discussing who is going to run for what local post, and when, and applying strategy. How fun it all is. City council or board of county commissioners? Now those are appointments that will have a significant impact upon an America that is quickly descending into a Communistic hellhole.

Truth is, the car wash libertarians will be the ones cowering in a corner the day they come for our guns (under a massive, federal gun control act) and our children (under federal, child “protective services” laws or a national service act). But they may have a post or two at some tiny township, with such important duties as arranging for an annual dinner at the VFW or setting up the car wash fundraiser to pay for new lamp posts along Main Street. The car wash libertarians tend to have scant knowledge of history, monetary policy, constitutional disputes, and the political philosophers who have, over the years, defended states’ rights and the natural rights of the individual against the totalitarian, centralized state. In fact, they tend to shy away from the intellectual life because it’s not as fun, or as social, as the monthly meetings and supper club invites.

In spite of the radicalism of many of the early LPâ€™ers, in 30+ years the LP has made no advances whatsoever, except that a few of them hold feeble local offices where it is their brand of politics in charge as versus the other guy’s rules. One guyâ€™s coercion in place of another guyâ€™s coercion offers us no progress whatsoever in terms of quelling the federal expansion that is speedily choking off life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The rapid-fire socialization of America, I hope, will have the effect of turning many of these libertarians toward more radical plans of action.

The Feds are engaged in a sweeping series of measures to take complete control of the financial system (which is forever destroyed) and selected business entities; ratchet up plans for perpetual war; socialize health care; further implant federalized education and criminalize homeschooling; grab guns and ammo; remove children from the homes of dissenters; commence race wars and class wars; force young adults into mandatory state service camps; send protesters to FEMA camps; and on and on and on.

At this point, none of this can be undone through time-consuming, political means. Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, and the other agents of Obama’s unfreedom brigade were brought to Washington D.C. for one very specific purpose: to centralize every last bit of property and life and put it all under federal rule, from money to education to personal behavior. Note the condescending and arrogant behavior of King Obama on the 60 Minutes television show as he laughed at the inability of majority opinion to do a damn thing to stop his freight train of power grabs and federal takeovers.

Perhaps the most significant move on the part of the Feds, outside of crushing the free market through rapid nationalization, is the move on the part of the centralizers to extinguish the single most important characteristic of a free society â€“ the right to bear arms. A society in which individuals cannot bear arms is a society doomed to eternal serfdom and oppression from self-serving overlords. Attorney General Eric Holder has long been an advocate of snuffing out gun rights, yet he got through the confirmation process with nothing more than a few feeble whimpers from helpless Republicans playing partisan games. Even worse is a recent occurrence that is perhaps unprecedented on the part of modern presidential administrations. Rahm Emanuel, in his capacity as Chief of Staff, is being utilized outside of his official role and is acting in the role of propagandist by lobbying for absolute and unconditional gun control. Emanuel, an Israeli citizen, is attempting to target gun owners by categorizing them in terms that will brand them as terrorists (the governmentâ€™s favorite buzz word) in the eyes of their fellow Americans. Yet there has been no challenge to Emanuel for stepping outside his role and becoming an official flag-bearer for the disarming of America.

Gun rights is one of the most visible issues causing states to retreat and claim the federal government has gone way beyond its limits. In Montana, elected officials have signed a resolution declaring that any ruling by the Federal government on the Second Amendment violates its statehood contract. In fact, Montanans are moving to add more lenient concealed weapons laws to whatâ€™s already on the books. In Tennessee, state Senator Doug Jackson, a Democrat, has filed legislation that would ban the sale of micro-stamped firearms and ammunition. Such laws will mean a federal registry of gun owners, and Jackson calls this insanity “a preamble to gun confiscation.”

The other prime mover spurring claims of sovereignty on the part of states is rejection of the Federal Reserve and its illiberal policies that enslave the citizens of states by locking them into its inflationary fiat money machinations and debases their currency. Legislators in some states, such as Georgia and Montana, have agitated in favor of throwing off the Federal Reserve in favor of instituting a sound money policy advocating the use of gold and silver as opposed to the Fedâ€™s legal tender notes. In Montana, Representative Bob Wagner introduced a sound money bill (HB 639), though it later died in committee along partisan lines. As times go on and the economic landscape becomes even gloomier, we are more likely to see many more of these kinds of initiatives on the part of state legislatures.

Gold, as such, is a tool for protection against the collapse of the dollar, which is why opponents of the Federal Reserve desire to buy it and hold it. Guns are the tools with which you defend yourself, not only from the local criminal who wants what you have, but even more so, they provide free men with the capability for physical resistance from a federal government whose expansion of powers and oppressive tactics are out of control. Think Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder, and ask why it is that they champion an agenda that puts guns only into the hands of the government and its approved agents.

The only way to get this oppressive tyrant â€“ known as the federal government â€“ off our back is to break away from it and start anew. That twenty-eight states are starting to fan the flames of rebellion by moving towards a sovereign itinerary is fairly remarkable. States and people must declare their sovereignty and remove the tentacles of the federal government’s oppressive laws from their necks. Only a breakup of this monstrous and out-of-control, despotic giant can restore freedom and keep us all from descending further into the federal governmentâ€™s grip.

Karen De Coster [send her mail] is a Certified Public Accountant, has an MA in Economics, and works in finance and accounting in the securities industry. See her website and her blog.